[macvoiceover] Re: Pages and pages of info about pages but nothing about VO
- From: Chris Hofstader <cdh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 08:30:46 -0500
Sara,
Documentation on using an application with VO will necessarily be
different enough from that published for the mainstream user that the
effort taken to write about VO with almost any specific application
can turn into a massive task.
Also, because VO gets its data from an accessibility API layer, many
programs may just work with the AT without any extra efort from the
developers who may not even know that their app works with VO at all.
To create proper documentation for the world of software that works,
even without developer intent, would require that somewhere someone
spends their time looking for programs and scours them for
accessibility with VO, tries to do work around actions and then writes
it all down in a coherent manner. This person would have a thankless
job as she will inevitably miss stuff and the docs will also fall out
of date as software is upgraded. Telepathy might also be a
requirement for this job as things can become accessible or not and
somehow this person will need to figure it out.
If VO advertises that it works with a specific version of an
application it should include documentation on ways to use the app
with the screen reader. If, on the other hand, users find that
programs in the wild (including programs from Apple) work well but do
so accidentally maybe a user wiki would be a good place to store such
"how to" and other useful things like scripts and such.
FS gets a lot of documentation written by users this way (look at the
JAWS with VisualStudio documentation project that runs more than 100
pages and has had at least a thousand hours invested in it by the gang
on the blind programming mailing list) as an example of what the
community can do. As VO comes at no costand JAWS costs $1100, we can
except that the community put in a little extra time to help with
issues and application support that may not enter Apple's radar
screen. That we blinks have to do this for FS after spending more for
our AT than we did for our computer is fairly outrageous. JAWS is
also far more capable of predicting what will and will not work and
what work arounds can be used than a purely API driven system. JAWS
documentation includes a "popular applications" section which, if you
read through it, is woefully out of date.
Need more coffee, I'm rambling...
cdh
On Jan 31, 2009, at 10:33 PM, Sara wrote:
The problem with Pages etc. that I have noticed is there is no
website or document that I know of that tells users of VO how to
operate the thing. I have the Pages manual but as far as I have
seen, it's all about clicking with the mouse, which is logical for
the majority of people in the world I guess, but since Apple went to
all the trouble of making it accessible, you'd think there'd be some
sort of documentation or are we supposed to just fumble through it
like blind people?
Sorry for the harsh tone but I just don't understand why there is so
little info. Please tell me I am just missing it and that it really
exists on a website somewhere.
Sara
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